An ‘intelligent spectacle’

Henrietta Bredin talks to David Pountney about running the Bregenz Festival

Back in the days when David Pountney was director of productions at English National Opera, his so-called office was a tiny broom cupboard of a space carved out of a backstage cranny of the London Coliseum, with a single grubby window overlooking a narrow passageway known as Piss Alley for obvious and strongly smelling reasons. He now, as artistic director of the Bregenz Festival in Austria, occupies a lavishly appointed sort of control tower, with floor-to-ceiling windows looking out across Lake Constance and giving a direct hawk’s-eye view of the stage built out into the lake, which is the festival’s major attraction. He has a remote-control device on his desk with which he can stop the boat heading towards Lindau on the opposite shore and send it on to Wasserburg instead, change the points on the railway track running along the lake shore and manoeuvre the two giant cranes lifting parts of the set into place.